


Call of the Void

by cloudsongs



Category: X-Men (Movieverse), X-Men (Original Timeline Movies), X-Men - All Media Types
Genre: Alien Invasion, Alien Planet, Aliens, F/M, Friendship, Self-Destruction, Suicide
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-19
Updated: 2019-04-21
Packaged: 2020-01-16 15:31:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 4
Words: 14,361
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18524377
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cloudsongs/pseuds/cloudsongs
Summary: The world is ending. Logan and Rogue find themselves in a stone tower in the middle of an inescapable forest. Marie reflects on her life before the apocalypse and how they all found little ways to destroy their worlds.





	1. Part I

**Author's Note:**

> AU Notes: Rogue can keep others' abilities indefinitely. The order of events are slightly off.

"You cannot expect me to sit around and do  _nothing_  while everyone else is actually making an effort to stop this!" Rogue shook in rage as the hulking man in front of her made no indication that he heard her. She tried to run past him, but he caught her in one arm and pushed her back towards a small tunnel dug into the sandstone colored tower. Rogue growled in frustration and ran at him with full force, knocking him back one step. "You cannot do this to me, Logan. Kitty and Bobby are still out there fighting, and you want me to just wait it out  _here_?"

He must have knocked her in the head harder than expected because she couldn't quite remember the events that led up to her kidnapping. The evacuations, the sirens, the fighting, she remembered. The dark figure in the sky, pulling all life into it. The days after were black.

She had woken up on a large pile of what looked like yellow fur in a round room with extended half-circles cut on one side of the wall. Impossibly tall trees close enough to touch stood right outside of the window. When she walked out of the tunnel leading out of the room, she found herself standing in a long, curving hallway with steps leading downstairs on one side and a wide ledge two-hundred feet to the ground and overlooking the forest outside.

Logan sat on the ledge, a cigarette between his lips, looking defeated.

When he couldn't answer her angry questions about where they were, she used Jean's abilities to hypnotize him so she could stock up on the strange-looking fruit growing at the base of the tower and ventured out into the surrounding forest before she realized that he had literally left her in an unnavigable area far from civilization. Each time, she would collapse from starvation or dehydration and would wake up hours later in the same fur-pile in the same cave in the tower. Even telekinetic flying didn't get her very far. There was the forest and the tower.

"Move, Logan, I'm going," she yelled.

"Marie, it's over," he said in a low voice.

Rogue froze for a moment, not comprehending what he said. "What are you talking about?"

"The Void… _it_  attacked the mansion. Everyone's dead. We're not going back. It's over."

Her skin tingled, reactivating itself like it did when she was in dangerous or stressful situations. She put her hands up in front of her as a warning "don't touch me." Logan didn't bother putting a comforting hand on her bare arm. A hollow feeling replaced the burning anger in her chest; a large lump sits in her throat. Rogue turned away from him and walked back into the cave she woke up in. She took a long look at the open space with the pile of fur in one corner. She collapsed on the pile and took a nap.

They danced around each other for days. Rogue refused to talk to him, much less make eye contact with him. She wanted to ask why he had bothered to save  _her_  of all people but more importantly, why were they hiding out here, wherever here was. But she couldn't stand before him and keep the urge to scream at him or hurt him at the same time. His presence itself made her vibrate in rage because he only served to remind her of the family she lost. But she admitted she was being stupidly stubborn. This was not the way an X-Man solves their problems.

Sometimes, he came into her room at night when she was on the cusp of waking up from a nightmare, gently smoothing his hands over her hair and neck, knowing it would calm her instantly, never hesitating to touch her. The first night he asked her whose dream it was, and she almost burst into tears when he considered that not all her dreams belonged to her. When she said it was his, he apologized in that low, silky voice and she slipped back into the darkness.

Otherwise, Logan did his best to minimize her awful reaction to him because she hardly ever saw him during the daytime. Most times she didn't find him in the long hallway, and she wondered where he slept. He certainly hasn't been sleeping in  _her_  pile of fur. There were several other tunnels that ran throughout the spiraling hallway, some tunnels branching off into multiple tunnels or caves. Sometimes she would find ash leading up to a tunnel and then be unsure which forking path he took.

The times that he was sitting on the ledge, he ignored her, choosing instead to spend his time with a book in his hand. He claimed he woke up with an entire bookshelf carved into the wall of his cave. This brought up more questions that she was too stubborn to ask. Why didn't she get any books? He offered her his books when he finally led her to his cave after she asked.

This annoyed her more than she cared to admit.

Rogue had never been much of a reader. She enjoyed mathematics more than literature, but Logan didn't carry many math or science books around. He had shelves of classics -some first editions that probably could be sold for a small fortune. She flipped through an old, weathered copy of  _The Canterbury Tales_  that laid flat on the edge of the bookshelf. The book opened up to a ribbon marked page titled "The Manciple's Tale." Stubbornly, she refused to pick up his apparent hobby and instead dwelled in her own thoughts. It seemed like those would be her only entertainment in the meanwhile.

She laid down on a pile of fur (she learned they were leaves of a type of tree within the surrounding forest) which was surprisingly more comfortable than hers. Logan's familiar scent lingered; Marie felt a bit embarrassed sniffing it but at least she knew where he slept, as if it mattered.

It was hours before Rogue remembered exactly why she stopped minding when Logan left the mansion so often. It hurt her in the beginning, him roaming off to "find himself" without her. They were supposed to be a team. The wanderers that refused to pick a side a fight they didn't start. Then he would come back and maybe talk to her for a grand total of five minutes before chasing Jean Grey's tail and pissing off Scott Summers. She did not even notice that until Jubilee brought it up one night when he came home, and the girls were up late eating an obscene amount of food while watching movies with their favorite heartthrobs.

"Doesn't that just piss you off?" asked Jubilee as if she was sharing a secret.

"He talks to me more than five minutes," defended Marie.

"I hate to say it," said Kitty, "but Jubilee is a little bit right." She smiled sheepishly when Marie shot her a hurtful look. "C'mon, he just got home after leaving for another two months and where is he now?"

"Not with you," said Jubilee in a sing-song voice. She yelped when Kitty threw a handful of popcorn at her.

"Don't be mean," warned Kitty.

Marie looked doubtful. "He has a lot of important stuff to do with Professor X. With his memory and stuff. Obviously, he wouldn't have time to hang out with me."

"I saw him flirting with Jean earlier. That doesn't look like important stuff," said Jubilee. She picked off a kernel of popcorn from her dark hair. "Girl, all I'm saying is that it's pretty fucking rude of him to come back after worrying you for  _months_  and not have the decency to spend one evening with you. He obviously thinks of you as a kid."

"I'm not worried about him!" Marie said hotly. Jubilee's last statement stung. Marie just turned eighteen three months ago. Sure, she still did things with her friends that might classify her as "one of the kids" but who was to say which age you could stop having movie-nights with your girlfriends or go out and binge drink for absolutely no reason?

Kitty laid a calming hand on Marie's shoulder. "I  _think_  what Jubilee is saying is that maybe Logan isn't prioritizing this relationship as much as you are. And that is completely unfair to you. Maybe it's time you move on to someone who will appreciate you more. Bobby, for example. He's a really nice guy and he's really into you."

"Ohmigod, Bobby is  _such_  a dreamboat. You two would be so cute together," Jubilee crooned.

"I guess," Marie grumbled. She didn't really like thinking about boyfriends after what she did to her last one. "I'm going down to get a drink."

Marie opened the fridge with the vague hope that she would find unchaperoned bottles of beer but only found soda. She grabbed a chilled bottle and headed back to the common room when she heard a clank from the garage. She peeked through the ajar door and saw Logan tinkering away at Scott's bike.

"You gonna just stand there or come help me?" asked Logan without looking back at her.

Marie smiled. "Sabotage or necessary repairs?"

"How about you hand me that wrench and find out?" He winked at her and gave her a smile that made her heart throb more than any of the actors in the movies three floors up.

After she gave him his wrench, she sat on a stool next to him and crossed her legs and rested her chin on the heel of her hand. She saw him glance at her bare legs, her shorts just barely reaching mid-thigh. She plucked at the shear pantyhose covering her legs as an explanation. Logan looked away for a second, as if to be polite. She didn't think she would mind if he kept staring.

When he saw her drinking her soda, he held up the bottle of beer next to him. She excitedly grabbed it from him, shot him a grateful smile, and took a deep swallow. "Thanks," she said. "Needed that." Marie handed the bottle back to him.

Logan drank after her. "Our secret." He got up from his crouch beside the bike and dragged another stool to sit in front of her.

"How was your trip?" she asked. She restlessly moved her legs, brushing against the rough denim covering Logan's knees.

He pursed his lips. "A bust. Almost crashed the bike on the way back."

"On purpose?" she joked.

Logan let out a surprised laugh, as if she had said something he had already thought about.

"Funny thing," he said as he shook his head. "No, not on purpose. Not on purpose."

He told her about his visit to Alcatraz as they both took turns taking sips from the bottle. Marie wanted to joke that hell must have frozen over because Wolverine was sharing alcohol. As he recalled his little adventure, Marie thought about how much she missed being out on the road. It was rough and tiring…but nothing felt more freeing.

"So," Logan started. "The nightmares. Need to talk about it? You doin' okay?"

The first thing Marie thought was,  _who told you I was having nightmares?_

Several months passed since that night on Liberty Island. The only reminders left of that night were the stark-white streaks of hair and the occasional agglomeration of her and Wolverine's nightmares of the different events. Sometimes she woke up forgetting that Magneto did not trap her in a metal box and fuse her bones with adamantium. Sometimes she forgot that she didn't enjoy smoking and red-headed women.

"No," she replied. She didn't specify which one of his questions she was answering. "Anyway, are you…planning on staying for a while?" she asked as nonchalantly as she could. She wiggled her toes and looked anywhere except at him. Her legs brushed his again.

"For a while," he echoed.

Marie began to smile when she noticed he was looking past her towards the garage door. She turned and saw Jean leaning against the doorframe. She wore a long-sleeved shirt and a pair of worn jeans.

Jean waved when she was noticed. "I just got a shipment for new equipment for the lab," she said. "Logan, would you like to make yourself useful and help me put everything away?"

"Slim not around?" asked Logan wryly.

Jean rolled her eyes. "He's down there already." She jerked her head towards the hallway. "Come on."

"My pleasure," he said cordially. He smiled at Marie once more before patting her knee softly and tousling her hair and then walking away. Marie's heart squeezed as if she experienced a crushing loss but felt a little warm despite it. At least he made the effort to touch her like no one else did.

Marie bit her lip as she stared at the motorcycle in front of her. It was sleek in design and probably the coolest splurge Scott had before it was "borrowed" by Logan. She imagined herself suddenly on the bike driving a recklessly high speed over a broken bridge. A laugh escaped her. She probably wouldn't even get ten feet past the driveway before crashing. She finished off the rest of the beer and returned to her evening with her friends.

Rogue found herself hurling his books at him that evening. She could tell by the way he clenched his fists that he was fighting the urge to unsheathe his claws and shred the books that flew at him. He wouldn't though, of that she was absolutely certain.

"Why the hell. Would. You. Save.  _Me._  You.  _Asshole!_ " With every pause she threw another book at him, sometimes using Jean's abilities to throw multiple at once.

He begged her to stop.

She stared at him and wondered: would he kill her if she actually destroyed his precious little books?  _Guess I should find out._  Marie grabbed  _The Canterbury Tales_ at the same time activating Pyro's abilities. The thin papers burned quickly as if it were doused in oil, the crackles like music to her ears.

Logan crashed into her with all his weight, knocking the air out of her lungs. The flaming book seared into the flesh of both their abdomen following with two pained cries until the fire dissipated.

"Why didn't you save  _anyone_  else?" she screamed though her voice came out as a rasp from her inability to breathe properly with him still on top of her. "You should have saved Xavier. You should have saved Kitty or Ororo or anyone else. Why did you save  _me_?" Her long wail staggered into short sobs and then a painful inhale. Repeat.

Logan's face hovered above her own, his jaw set but lip quivering. "I couldn't." He swallowed painfully. "Marie, I couldn't. You…I could never leave you behind."

_But you always left me behind._

With Piotr's strength, she pushed him off so hard he flew to the other side of the cave. She let the ashes of  _The Canterbury Tales_  shed off of her as she watched the burnt skin bubble and move until it was flat and only slightly pink. Without another glance, she stormed off into her own cave and dove into the pile.

It was a long while before Logan entered. Rogue laid on her side facing the window, wide awake, but didn't make a sound of acknowledgement. She heard his heavy steps come closer. The scent of the strange-fruit wafted to her nose, tempting her to hungrily accept his gift. Rogue challenged herself and buried her face further into the pile, refusing to look at him. The very thought of what he had done made her want to scream and hurt him. How could he have been so selfish to bring her here while  _everyone_  they loved sacrificed their lives to save the world. How could he do that?

"Marie," she heard Logan say lowly. "You need to eat. Get up."

Till the end, Rogue did not understand why his words triggered something so unrelated in her mind. She thought of the mission in Worthington facility so many years after she first arrived at the X-Mansion when she and Kitty ran through the sterile white halls, gasping for breath, not daring to look back to see whether Juggernaut was still behind them.

Marie collided into Kitty's back as the smaller girl stood, frozen. She was about to push Kitty and scream at her for stopping when she saw what had caught the girl by surprise. The hall before them stained red, blood pooling on the floor and dripping down the hall. Arms, legs, torsos -still wearing ironed lab coats and pleated pants-  _heads_ -Marie couldn't tell which appendage belonged to who.

Kitty began to wheeze in front of her, struggling to catch her next breath. Marie shook herself back to their task at hand when she heard the rumbling sound of the large man pursuing them. She clasped Kitty's hand, skin to skin, still such a foreign feeling after a year of gaining control and pulled the girl forward further into the blood hallway, their feet slipping on the slick floor.

Suddenly, the smaller girl yanked her back, causing Marie to fall onto her back. Their hands were still joined together in desperation as Kitty screamed at the top of her lungs. Marie looked up to see Kitty's other arm in the tight grip of the Juggernaut.

Without her own volition, Piotr's mutation took over and she felt the icy metal overtake her skin. She tightened her grip on Kitty's tiny arm and pulled with her all her might. "Kitty, get us through the wall!" she screamed. Kitty stopped screaming and struggling against Juggernaut and turn on her abilities as Marie pulled them through the adjacent bloody wall. She watched the wood and steel beams pass around her as they slowly walked from the hallway into the stark white room. The room was made to be a simple room for a patient but was cluttered with machines, vials, and syringes, with a single bed right in the middle. She saw a small form underneath unmade bed. Immediately she let go of Kitty's arm and rushed towards the bed. She knelt beside it and lifted the bed skirt up to reveal a small, pale boy curled up in a fetal position underneath. The little boy watched her with wide, frightened eyes. She stretched out her hand towards the boy, smiling weakly to placate him. The boy tentatively touched her fingers with his own. A ripple passed in the micrometer space between their fingers. Kitty's shriek panicked the boy, forcing him to pull his hand away from Marie. She turned to focus on pulling all of Kitty in and saw that Juggernaut's body was halfway through the wall too. Panicked, she reached out her hand to her friend and she exclaimed, "Kitty!"

Kitty didn't even react to Marie's voice or her outstretched hand. One moment, Juggernaut growled at the two women. The next moment, the superior portion of Juggernaut's body cut in one sharp slice and smacked onto the floor. Then came the violent screaming as liters of blood flowed out from his abdomen and sliced upper appendages.

Kitty fell to the floor in shock, Juggernaut's thick, sausage-like fingers still wrapped around her thin wrist. A blood curdling scream left her mouth.

Marie knew she did the wrong thing just as she was doing it when the syringe slipped into the inside pocket of her jacket.

Marie turned back towards the white bed, not wanting to look at Kitty, afraid that the loyal X-Man would see the betrayal on her face. "It's okay, sweetie," said Marie gently to the boy with the sound of Juggernaut's scream still violating the room. "We're here to save you."

Days after the incident, Marie knocked on Kitty's door. The girl hadn't left her room since they returned to mansion with the young mutant boy. Although many people tried to get her out to eat or at least check to see if she suffered from any injuries, Kitty refused them all. She said she wanted to be alone.

There were lots of people at the mansion who justified her actions at the Worthington facility. They said anybody in that position would have done exactly what she did. But none of that erased the moment when Hank and further X-Men members found them both in the room with the little boy and the "what did you do" that slipped out of his mouth. Marie didn't blame them, of course. She thought maybe she would have had the same reaction as well.

"Kitty," she called. "Kitty, you've been in there for days. Please come out." No response. She activated Pyro's abilities and melted the door handle until she could easily push the door in.

Marie walked in expecting Kitty to be tucked away in her bed, avoiding existence, much like Marie herself had after Magneto tried to kill her, after Pyro tried to kill himself. Instead, the girl sat on the edge of her bed staring at the sunlight pouring in through her window. She kicked her legs back and forth, her feet sometimes freely passing through the bed frame. Kitty finally sighed and looked at Marie and smiled. She was noticeably thinner for a girl who was already too thin, and her hair hung limply over her bony shoulders. But Marie couldn't take her eyes off of that smile.

Marie said the only thing she could think of at that moment because they still did not know whether it was she or Kitty who really killed him. "He deserved it."

They looked at one another for a long time before Kitty finally broke eye contact and continued to stare at the sunlight. "Yeah. He did," she said. She looked back and Marie realized she couldn't properly see Kitty's eyes. She expected to see the accusation, the knowing look, or even a question.  _Were you the one who did it?_  Her pupils were bright yellow, almost reflecting the sun. "But I wonder if he would think the same way. I think I deserved it too."

"It wouldn't be the same," Marie tried to argue, but Kitty was suddenly gone.

She stared at the empty bed for a few seconds until she heard a loud thump somewhere downstairs and many panicked screams. Marie rushed down the stairs from the third floor to the first and saw a crowd of students gathered around. When a student whimpered, "oh my god there's so much blood," she pushed past them to see Kitty flat on her back, her left leg bent in an odd angle, a pool of blood escaping from the back of her head.

"Hank!" yelled Marie.

The kids surrounding them suddenly caught on and began to disperse, looking for other responsible adults.

She knelt down beside Kitty and felt for a pulse. Weak and thready but still there. She called out for Hank again. She heard a couple of the kids down one hallway answers her, letting her know that Hank was on his way.

"Kitty, why?" she pleaded.

Kitty weakly rolled her head to face Marie. "I felt it calling to me; all I had to do was answer."

"What? What was calling to you?"

The Kitty said something that Marie had heard again and again for a long time. "The Void," she whispered. "I heard a call of the void."

"She was my friend," she mumbled into her furs, knowing Logan would hear. She tried to breathe through the nose and struggled with a juicy sniffle. "And after everything she's been through, I just left her there by herself." The furs were close to suffocating her, but she would be damned if she let him hear her sobbing.

She heard a thud as Logan set the strange-fruit beside her. The pile sunk under his weight by her legs. Minutes passed in silence. She wondered whether he was trying to come up with something to say that wouldn't make her grab the tray and throw it at him.

"Left her too," he said finally. His voice was gruff and curt as if he had cried too. "I left all of them."

Rogue peeked at his stubbly face, still young so many years since they first met during that cold winter. He caught her staring with glinting eyes. She ducked underneath the furleaves and turned to face away from him. She laid there silently for what felt like hours before he finally got up and left the room, walking away from her as he always did.


	2. Part II

The Void arrived sooner than anyone expected though the signs were always there. Marie was twenty-seven and the world was ending.

That was what Professor Xavier was calling it.  _The Void_ : a homage to Scott's observation (before his own fiancée murdered him) that people no longer behaved as rationally as they once did…or rather could. Professor X tried communicating with the emerging alien to spare the human race and to keep moving but his diplomacy was answered with nothing but blackness and white noise.

And when it reached Earth, there was no clear way to fight it. It was smoke, dust, and air, violating the bodies of its victims, allowing them to accept that nothingness existed and did not need an explanation. The plants no longer resembled themselves. People no longer resembled themselves. It soon became commonplace to see people ram their vehicles into guardrails or drop their babies from the second story of malls. The new normal was seeing hordes of people standing still for hours on end, staring into space, unresponsive to outside stimulation; it was suddenly realizing that your neighbor has been missing for weeks.

News reports claimed that victims were exposed to spores released by the Void. The Void must be an alien plant. People refused to leave their homes, in fear of catching the Void. Xavier encouraged students to stay within the mansion at all times. The outdoors was dangerous. Two mutants with biological/plant-based mutations were invited to the Xavier Institute to communicate and possibly manipulate the alien into releasing its hold on the human population. Marie used to shiver at thoughts of Pyro and the blackness he left in her mind. Had he been a victim? She hoped sometimes, but then where did that leave her?

It left her feeling…blank.

And she itched to feel again.

* * *

Sunlight flooded the immediate vicinity of the tower, warming the air, thickening it when Rogue went outside on the lower levels. It had taken her more time than expected to walk down the steep flight of stairs to the ground floor, but there was nothing but anger and  _fruit_  upstairs, so she walked rather than flew. The moment she stepped past the tree line, the wind moaned and chilled, and the sunlight failed to penetrate all the way to the earth. Somehow, she found this calming.

She was approximately three miles deep into the forest from the tower trying in an effort to avoid Logan. He assumed she was making another escape attempt but when he saw that she did not carry any food or water, he plopped back down on the ledge and let her leave peacefully. She wondered how he still had so many cigarettes.

Something about the forest of strange-trees didn't look right, but not because she didn't recognize these trees. She had taken this route during her first couple escape attempts. First, she thought Logan might have cut down some of the trees for firewood, but the surrounding area showed no evidence of a cut tree. No lonely stump, no broken branches scattered messily on the ground. Although she didn't like the unexplained change, she would not have given it more than a minute or two more of her attention if she hadn't seen the small purple vine climbing up the trunk of a large strange-tree with three bulging roots burrowed within three long mounds. The tree was about a mile deep into the forest from the tower, an otherwise inconspicuous sapling if not for the mislocated vine and the oddly shaped roots. She examined it closer and concluded it was a wisteria vine with a daisy flower. She followed the length of the vine down to the root which was burrowed inside a groove within the trunk of the strange-tree.

She wedged her thumbs on either side of the small groove, pulling herself closer to peer inside. The light didn't reach far enough inside. She tightened her grip on either side of the trunk and pulled apart the trunk with her bare hands. Ropes of vines shot out from the crack in the trunk until she finally found the small bulb emerging from a waxy dark seed.

"How did you get here little guy?" she mumbled to herself. With a firm grip, she plucked out the seed from the trunk and scrutinized it carefully. The stem was translucent and white with blue splotches appearing every other inch of the vine. The tips of the vine delicately wrapped around her hand, nestling in the warmth of her palm. Rogue smiled at the plant -she must have activated Lin Li's -Nature Girl's -abilities by accident.

A caveat to taking a cure to a genetic mutation that was not approved by the FDA was that eventually, the mutation itself would mutate, supercharging them. She quickly found out that if she concentrated hard enough, she could grab the memories and mutations of the people around her as she pleased, enough to have a new ability of her own, though there was always a risk of hurting the hosts.

She decided to put the dark seed back into the cool space inside the trunk. The vines slithered backwards into the trunk and wrapped itself around the seed as if to protect it. Along several layers of vines, triangular patches on the vines struck out like spikes. Rogue watched as the vines tightened and spiked, suddenly unsure whether it was Nature Girl or the plant itself making these motions. She would ask Logan about these woods later.

Many hours later, after she abandoned the fusion of plant life in its habitat, it occurred to her that she had not possessed Lin Li's abilities because she had never touched the girl. In fact, she had never even met a Lin Li before.

* * *

St. John Allerdyce touched her before her own boyfriend Bobby Drake did.

It happened in Logan's close combat class, a course he agreed to teach begrudgingly (though she knew he secretly enjoyed it), that all high-school aged students could electively take if they expressed interest in training to be a X-Man. All the students wore their gym gear -formfitting and showing just enough skin to handle the heat from the crowd inside the room. Marie sweated in her full-length top and pants with up-to-the-elbow leather gloves. She normally wore clothes that hugged every curve of her body, sometimes choosing to wear a shear mesh bodysuit so that she could wear shorts and tanks like everyone else. But this was a risk for any intense activity. Her mesh suit could easily rip and expose her skin. Professor Xavier suggested she begin trusting herself with her skin more often, claiming that her own fear and suppression of her mutation only resulted in her lack of self-control. She would nod and agree while fully aware that she would not shed her layers for the safety of others. She wondered if he read her mind in those sessions. Maybe he would stop suggesting it.

Marie hoped that Bobby could be her partner while they sparred. She knew they would ultimately goof off, but she liked any reason to feel his hands roam over her clothes. She winked at Bobby, whose hand rested on her lower back, while Logan paired students off.

Jubilee stood beside them and greeted Logan with an excited "hey, Wolvie" which he rolled his eyes at. Somehow since his return, Jubilee had become the number 1 Wolverine fan. Marie had a hard time tying this girl to the same one months ago who tried to put down Logan for not giving Marie more attention.

She grinned when Logan finally stood in front of her, knowing he would favor her request. Logan raised an eyebrow at Bobby's hand loosely resting on her waist, dangerously close to her bottom. "Rogue and Pyro. Iceman and Shadowcat."

Her smile faltered as he continued on to pair other students. Bobby squeezed her hip and jostled into Kitty, who giggled and mockingly put her hands as if to box him. Crossing her arms and wearing a pinched expression, Marie turned to John, the biggest dickhead she'd ever met, who smirked and beckoned her over.

They started with practice maneuvers where Marie jabbed at John while he tried to duck and dodge her attacks. Logan went around the room, bellowing instructions, intercepting between students to hone their technique.

St. John was good at this. A lot better than her. He managed to strike her nearly four times on his first try, which irritated her more than fueled her.

Soon, he began to harangue her. "Bet you can't touch me even with those gloves off," he mocked.

With a roll of her eyes, she jabbed again but he slapped her arm away, laughing. "C'mon, chicken. Take 'em off."

Frustrated, Marie jabbed faster but he continued to swat her off as if he could see her from every angle until he caught her gloved wrist and smiled cheekily but Marie could see the lack of amusement in his eyes. She continued to stare at him until she felt a singe on her wrist making her quickly pull back. His handprint tattooed onto the leather, coarse and dry. Marie, worried that it would melt onto her arm, pulled off the glove. "Other one too, sweetie," he teased.

Marie growled and yanked off the other glove too and lunged for him. If he really wanted to be in the worst pain of his life, she was ready to grant him his wish.

Some of the students near them wavered in their own practice to send quick worried glances at the pair. John enjoyed this too much, she thought, just as he tried to slap her arm away like before. His hand connected to the bare skin of her arm. He had meant for it to look like an accident, but instantly his thoughts entered her mind, the first one being "I wonder how it feels."

It was as if the contact activated some innate ability to suction his skin onto hers, like the tentacles of an octopus. For a long time, she believed they were completely unaware of the passing of time. It may have been less than a second or maybe several minutes. St. John's eyes reflected something absurd, something incomprehensible to Marie. A feeling of overwhelming sadness overtook her; it clouded her mind, her senses. A sudden urge to be on fire.

She gaped at him in absolute confoundment. Instead of letting go, his fingers tightened on her wrist, though the color of his skin and the blackened veins and arterioles of his face and neck would lead to his death. As if he wanted this to continue. She did not want him in her head anymore. His eyelids fluttered and St. John was suddenly on the ground, Logan in front of her, his back facing her. He had pushed the younger man off of her and as if a spell broke, St. John laid on the ground groaning in pain. She finally heard the exclamations of the other students around her.

She refused to visit him in the infirmary. Bobby was by his side immediately because at least they were friends. All she could say was that he  _asked_  for it, almost literally. Though, she  _was_  worried that Professor Xavier had not summoned her to explain what happened. Her chest tightened in anticipation. What if he asked her to leave?

Logan, however, remained by her side constantly. From the moment she woke up to the moment she went to bed, he checked on her, took her out, continued to train with her -never questioning her decision to not see St. John. In fact, he actively encouraged her decision. Though her happiness to have him so close again, her surprise did not wane; she thought he would run away again.

Stubbornly or maybe cautiously, she maintained a 50-feet distance from the infirmary at all costs, even if she had to take the stairs on the other side of the mansion. It wasn't until Jubilee found her in her room playing Scrabble with Logan a couple days later and said, unlike her, quietly, "They think he might not make it through the night," that Marie finally decided to enter the infirmary.

"You don't have to go," Logan had told her. She wished she listened.

Many of the students that wanted to see St. John had already left at Jean's request. Only Scott, Jean, Xavier, and Logan remained beside him. Xavier was the only one close to St. John, the rest loitering nearby, not wanting to face a life leaving too soon.

She stood awkwardly at the foot of his bed, clasping and unclasping her hands, staring at her boots until she finally raised her head to look at him. St. John looked like Death. The normal warmth and glow in his face was gone; his skin was pale and sweaty, with his golden hair stuck to his forehead, and dark bruises circled his eyes. Marie couldn't breathe; had she done this? It was a joke, wasn't it? It was  _his_  joke. He did this. Or did she?

"Thank you for being here, Marie," said Xavier. "He appreciates your visit."

Her frown deepened. "Do you know that for sure? Did he tell you that?"

Xavier offered her a sympathetic smile. "I won't read his mind unless he reaches out to me, but he has not reacted negatively to your presence. I think this would be a good time for apologies."

_Apologies_? The combative personality within her wanted to scoff and sass and blame it all on the dying man on the bed.

"Come," said Xavier, reaching his hand out to beckon her towards the side of St. John's bed.

Marie bit her lip and stood beside him. Her eyes met Logan's, who appeared weary…and  _guilty_? She wished he could hold her or take her away from here and immediately felt guilty when she broke his gaze to glance at her loyal and sweet boyfriend sitting across the room.

"St. John," she called softly.

The man shifted towards her; it seemed to take him several minutes to focus his eyes. His muscles tensed at the sight of her.

"I'm sorry…this happened," she said, hoping she sounded convincing.

For a moment, she thought he was going to nod and go back to ignoring everybody in the room. He lowered his head -she thought he was crying.

Then she was on fire.

Pyro was on her, his fingers digging into her upper arms, her cotton shirt burning. She screamed in agony as his hands burned into her skin, melting away her epidermis, insistent on destroying through her dermis. More than the severe pain of burning, she felt  _him_ , an intense surge of black. This was not just fire, but a slow pour of molten lava into her throat.

He was off her once again. Marie laid there on the infirmary floor staring up at the man levitating above her. Jean's work. The fire was gone. He must be dead, she thought hollowly. Concerned voices reached her ears but she couldn't make sense of them. Logan's hand in her hand, his arm cradling her, holding her tight to his chest, she healed in a matter of minutes, the physical pain dissipating. But the darkness, the searing wave of emotions Marie had never experienced before stayed.

It was there to make a new home.

"What problems are ill-defined and options murky, control is an illusion and rationality an afterthought," said Xavier in front of the large audience of students. The school decided to hold a wake for St. John but also use it as an opportunity to discuss mental health and using one's abilities wisely. Marie was not required to attend since less than a week had passed since the incident. But she did anyway, standing near the back of the banquet hall with Bobby, Scott, and Jean. They stood on either side of her like a protective barrier. The only thing she could think was that they had picked the ugliest flowers to showcase. They all looked mutated -too large, too small, too wilted.

Logan, after his recovery, quickly left after leaving a simple note under her door that read " _I'm sorry. See you soon._ "

"L'appel du vide," said Scott softly to her under his breath. He gave her an apologetic look. "The call of the void."

"Suicidal ideation," Jean corrected beside him, a bitter edge in her voice. Jean, who had already said some inspirational words about remembering the life between birth and death, had taken St. John's death harder than anyone in the school, even Bobby, a surprise to everyone except Scott. He confided with her a few evenings after the event that Jean had believed the entire thing to be her fault. She had spent the most amount of time with St. John after his "injury" and that she believed that she should have been able to pick up on his emotional cues. If not that, she should have been able to get a hold of St. John before he attacked Marie.

"That's stupid," Marie had mumbled.

"I bet you think you're somehow responsible for all this as well?"

Scott only had to see her face to get his answer.

Bobby squeezed her hand softly once before withdrawing his hands into his armpits. He was doing that a lot lately. "He wasn't suicidal," he said.

The words might have been right, but the feeling wasn't. Was St. John really suicidal? He had a great life at Xavier's School -he had what he could have never gotten in his rotten home: friends, family, a great education, training to be a superhero, etcetera, etcetera. What could possibly lead a man who looked like glowing gold, who had the ability to warm and give life choose to die? Why had he chosen  _her_  skin as the way to go?

_L'appel du vide_. She considered the words and looked at her hands through the sheer black gloves. Parts of her palm where the fabric of the gloves bunched were dark, like small black holes in her hands. She swallowed with difficulty. It hurt to think that someone had looked at her, touched her, and believed that there was an emptiness within her to examine, to conquer, to die for.

Suicidal? She couldn't say for sure, even though she felt glimpses of him within her mind.

Maybe not a death wish, she thought, but rather a search for some confirmation that he was, indeed, alive. It couldn't just be suicidal ideation -it had to be something more valuable and less concrete than that. It was something to satisfy that bottomless emptiness inside. It was an urge to answer nothing with... _something_.

* * *

On the ledge sat Logan, leaning fully against the wall, facing the outside. At first, Rogue thought he was putting on a show with his heavy breathing and muffled groans until she realized that he had not heard her approaching from behind.

She purposely cleared her throat loudly.

Logan turned slightly but this movement led to a harsh exhale through his teeth. Rogue immediately went to his side and crouched to assess him, all anger put aside. He wore a light blue shirt, fully unbuttoned, with angry red burns across his abdomen peeking behind the white shirt he held tightly against himself.

She met his eyes with shock. "Why haven't you healed?" she asked incredulously. Her hands immediately went to her own stomach where the burns from last night were nothing more than a memory. Quickly, she pulled the shirt off him, careful to peel of parts that had sewn itself into his skin. "Sorry," she whispered before ripping it off in one go. Logan doubled over, groaning, his fists pounding the ground. For the first time, Rogue noticed how much weight the two of them had lost. Strangefruit as their only food-source was taking a toll on both of them.

Once he settled and his breathing slowed down, she sat beside him, one hand left on a once familiar spot above his knee. "What do you need to tell me?" she asked with a straight face. Though, deep down, she wanted to shake him and find a way to transport them back to the X-Mansion where Hank McCoy would undoubtedly have an explanation and solution ready for them. Then, she remembered that it was all gone and all he had was her.

"My mutation is gone." Logan said this clearly, with no hesitation in his voice.

Rogue blinked. "How can you suddenly not have your mutation?" she asked. The second she said it, she pressed her lips thinly, kicking herself mentally for her stupid question. She knew exactly how to suddenly not have your mutation. She had done it herself, hadn't she? Grabbing that tantalizing vial in the Worthington facility, using the chaos of Juggernaut's death to inject herself. Even after she had gotten control of her abilities.  _Stupid girl._

"How did you even get your hands on the cure? They destroyed all of it," she said nonchalantly, refusing to meet his eyes. She looked down at her gloveless hands instead. "It doesn't work for long anyway -you'll get it back in a couple of days. And it'll be a lot stronger too." She said this last statement bitterly, remembering the day when she realized she could use her mutation without even touching anyone.

"I didn't take the cure," he said.

"The hell you didn't," she said. "Why did you take it?"

"I didn't take the cure," he repeated, his voice louder. He exhaled, a long  _whoosh_ , as if he if was trying to keep ahold of his temper. "But you can heal me; I'm sure you got Elixir's mutation in there somewhere too." He muttered something under his breath that she didn't catch. Rogue finally looked at him and, on his face, she saw weariness and sadness and unadulterated rage. He looked disappointed in her.

"Who is Elixir?" she asked in a low voice, though somehow, she already knew. He was a few years younger than her, training to be an X-Man and completing his teaching degree to work at Xavier's. His girlfriend Laurie had encouraged him to take over Jean Grey's job as the school physician after her untimely death. He was also their secret weapon against the Void. He had the ability of biological manipulation -the ability to heal. He seemed like a good guy, but Rogue knew she shouldn't have known all that.

"Who is Elixir?" she demanded. Rogue stood in front of him again. "Who is Nature-Girl?"  _Logan, where are we?_

"Kids trying to help," he answered, meeting her eyes. "Just kids."

This time Logan stood up and walked out.


	3. Part III

Long before she took the cure at Worthington Facility, Marie had once learned to control her mutation, a couple mouths out her nineteenth birthday. It was a nondescript session with Professor Xavier and Jean where Jean would use hypnosis to relax her so she could access her memories with more clarity.

Marie's and Jean's relationship had turned to something more awkward but familiar. It was the night before her first day in her physics program at a local university when Jean approached timidly after several weeks of getting benched by Scott from missions due to her inability to control her abilities and asked Marie if she could weaken her. "I know I should be ashamed to ask something like of you, Marie. Please know, I wouldn't be doing this if I didn't have any other options." So, Marie held Jean's hand on the infirmary bed until she passed out from the pain. Having Jean's abilities was  _awesome_. She found ease in using the telekinetic powers and quickly learned to fly from one of the students and her telepathy was still immature, only getting very strong emotional thoughts. Marie understood there would be cons to having yet another person in her head, but didn't fully see how bad things could get when she bumped into Scott in the Danger Room and realized how fiercely she was attracted to him. It was primal and confusing, and she didn't realize she was stalking towards him until his hands firmly held her shoulders. Scott sighed and pressed his lips together tightly. "I can't believe she asked you to do that." He then suggested to Xavier that they double his sessions with Marie and that night, she heard a screaming match between Scott and Jean. She had mastered Pyro's mutation and Jean's telekinesis, proving herself to be an asset to the X-Men team. Lately, she replaced Jean at Scott's side.

"Alright, now think of him, your friend from Mississippi," said Professor X. "Think of the memories, what you can access from the boy's mind."

Marie tried to call forward Cody, her ex-boyfriend who she'd almost killed when she first activated her mutation. Gently tapping away little doors in various corners of her subconscious, she tried to find the young teenager she once loved. She finally found a familiar opening in the back and verbally called out for him. She waited. Her single cue invited a crowd of people -all talking at once. She recognized Bobby's and Magneto's voices, felt the steely silence of Wolverine, and the manic laughter belonging to Pyro. A splitting pain wracked her mind.

"Professor, I-I can't. I feel like they're…I'm…destroying my mind…myself." Her voice was barely a whisper, the pain from her head bleeding down to her face. If having only touched a few people in her head since her mutation activated, she wondered how awful it would be to have thousands of people in her head. She would surely go mad.

"If you're going to destroy yourself, I want you to be in control of the destruction."

She felt Professor X in her mind, probing, and unlike the rush of water after the destruction of a dam, the collapse of her mental blocks led to…nothing. She sat in her chair for what felt like hours, staring at the lively daisies on Xavier's desk, marveling in the absolute silence in her mind. Two years of having Magneto whispering on and off in her head with no warning of his approach, Wolverine's unexplainable nightmares, that suffocating feeling Pyro left within her…all gone.

Marie sat up in her seat and pulled off her brown leather gloves. Her skin still looked the same. She didn't know why she expected her skin to melt off.

Professor Xavier moved his motorized chair towards her and held out his hand. "It's nice to finally met  _you_ , Anna-Marie."

With a shaky hand, she reached out and tentatively touched the tip of his finger. Nothing happened. He wasn't slumping in his chair with foam around his mouth. No change in pallor. No abnormally protruding veins. She slid her hand into his and shook his hand firmly, letting out an excited laugh.

"Thank you," she whispered to him. She found Jean already beside her, reaching down to tightly hug her. Their cheeks touched. "Thank you so much."

Marie left Xavier's office wanting to tell someone about this. She wanted to touch someone.  _Bobby_ , she thought. Bobby was a year younger than her, along with Kitty and Jubilee so he continued to attend classes with them at the X-Mansion. Marie, on the other hand, had graduated and attended a local university for a physics degree, staying only at the mansion to be prepared for on-call missions for X-Men.

She found Bobby in the rec room playing pool by himself with an intense concentration. She playfully approached him from behind and threw her arms around his waist and kissed his shoulder. Bobby went stiff in her arms but relaxed a fraction when he saw her behind him. He turned in her arms to greet her when he noticed her exposed arms and hands. Marie bit her lip, trying to contain her smile as she leaned in to kiss him for the first time.

Before their lips could meet, Bobby let out a panicked yelp and pushed her shoulders back, sending a burning sensation from her shoulders down to her deltoids. Her jaw dropped and she prepared to scream at him, "Oh my God, did you just give me a  _freezer_   _burn_?" until she saw the glint of fear in his wide blue eyes.

"I'm sorry," she said instead, a lump in her throat. The moment felt ruined. "I just wanted to surprise you." She held out her arms in front of her, pale and bare for him to examine. "I can touch you now. If you want."

Bobby immediately peeled himself off the wall and grabbed her by the waist, his hands already brushing the skin beneath the hem of her shirt. He curled his fingers around her beltloops and yanked her forward, crashing his lips to hers. One hand snaked up her slender neck and mapped its way down to her breast. "I've dreamed of touching you like this," he moaned into her lips.

No, that's not what happened. She wished it was. Instead, he hesitated to touch her, as if he too would burst into flames like she did not so long ago. He smiled weakly and hugged her, touching only the skin of her arms, the only space he trusted so far.

Marie wished Logan would come back.

Winter break arrived, three months since she learned to control her own mutation. She and Bobby planned on going to the Adirondacks for a few days as a couple's getaway; she felt giddy thinking about how romantic their first time together would be. Marie felt naive and ridiculous thinking about it, but it was the first time she thought about really having a future with someone.

She returned to the X-Mansion after a long day of finals to hopefully spend a mission-free holiday with the only family she loved and saw them together. Bobby froze a pond and goaded Kitty to try ice-skating. She stumbled and leaned heavily on him, giggling when they both almost went down. He guided her, taking her hand when she needed him, holding her close when she might fall. Then he stopped her and tilted her chin up to him and kissed her. And she kissed him back.

Marie broke up with him the next day in his room without an explanation. He begged her to not leave, to at least explain what he had done wrong. He said he loved her and that he wanted to work on whatever they needed to to be together again. She couldn't understand him. She left his room abruptly, speed-walking down the hall and stairs to get the hell out of this place before she hurt him or anyone else. She  _wanted_  to hurt him. How could he? How  _could_  he? What had  _she_  done wrong to deserve this? Everything about their relationship was perfect -she loved him, he loved her. They were both willing to compromise and they both had similar goals. They knew how to have fun and how not to get on the other's nerves. They could  _touch_  each other now. What had gone wrong? How could he destroy this?

She passed Kitty on the stairs with Bobby still trailing her. Bobby may not have understood her actions Kitty's large, apologetic eyes screaming in her head,  _"Marie, please, please forgive me, I'm so sorry,"_ knew that she could at least trust her best friend to pass along the message.

She no longer wore gloves, but nobody wanted to touch her. They knew what happened to St. John. They knew she managed to put the mighty Wolverine in the infirmary. They remembered how she would talk to herself when she was really trying to tell Magneto to shut up. Now the swirling blackness that St. John left behind was growing -she was starting to feel numb, like she was losing control. But she protected herself. That was the only reason she could say she never noticed it. That people were hell-bent on destroying themselves.

* * *

Rogue woke up from her nap (that's all she seemed to do lately. Other than wandering around the inescapable forest or using her various abilities as entertainment to pass the time or  _eating that goddamn fruit_ ) to gentle raindrops on her face. After rubbing her the sleep out of her eyes, she pulled herself up from the damp ground of the forest floor and stretched her arms over her head and let out a loud sleepy wail. Her camisole felt a little heavy from the rain and goosebumps climbed up her bare arms. She had gone on a long walk in the forest, scavenging for any other food sources. There were no animals, but there were several species of beetle-like (strangebugs, she called them) creatures that lived in the furtrees. After several hours, she decided to rest near the strangetree with the daisies and three roots.

She dropped her arms with a slap against her sides when she looked at the mounds at the base of the strangetree.

The mounds had broken in half, revealing three stony black bodies, surrounded by a sea of blooming sunflowers dancing in the wind. Every time a drop of rain hit the ground; a small green steam sprouted out from the wet earth, accelerating up, up,  _up_  to unimaginably tall sunflowers.

She went closer to the open mounds, moving aside the sunflowers to take a closer look. One body wore a dark suit, the second wearing a collared shirt and jeans, the third one wearing the issued X-Men uniform. The last body still had a shock of white hair.

Slack jawed and in disbelief, she stumbled and ran and half-flew back to the tower, her heart pounding in her chest. She found Logan in his usual spot on the ledge with a book in one hand and a strangefruit in the other.

"There are X-Men buried in the forest!" she shrieked. She fell to her knees and tried to breathe. "I think one of them is Ororo. Oh  _God._  There are  _sunflowers_  popping up everywhere! Where are we, Logan? What kind of place is this?"

Logan glanced out the window beside him to see the tall sunflowers waving their leaves. Then he went back to his book. "They were dead before we came here. I buried them when I first woke up."

Rogue stared at him in horror. "What the fuck are you talking about? What happened to them?"

"I told you before. The Void took all of them before we got here."

"How? Why didn't you tell me?"

"I told you they were all dead. There was no point leaving them here to rot. They needed a place to rest."

"What is this place?"

"I don't know."

Rogue just stared at him in shock as he continued to read.  _Ham of Rye,_  she read on the cover of the book. Eventually, she lowered herself to the wall across from him. "Where are we?" she demanded.

"We were in New York. At the mansion," he answered. "Now, I don't know. We might be in its planet."

Her voice began to tremble. "What the hell are you talking about? Aren't you the one who brought me here?"

"No."

"You didn't bring  _yourself_  here? To this place?"

"No." He finally looked up at her. "You did." He broke his gaze and looked out into the forest.

 _I didn't! Why the fuck would I do that?_  she wanted to scream, but it caught in her throat.

"Did…." Her hands were beginning to shake so she crossed her arms and held her hands tightly to her chest. "Did I do something to you…your mutation?"

Logan rested the book on his lap. He looked mournful. "Yes."

_Did I do something to them?_

An irrational fear overtook her. He could jump off that ledge and not survive. He could die and she would be alone. She would bury him with the rest.

With her heart racing and a fierce urge to cry, she said the only thing she could. "I'm sorry."

* * *

When Logan returned to the X-Mansion after more than a year and half since Marie got control of her abilities, he often drank himself to a stupor. This amazed her. Ever since she got her hands on his mutation, she found it difficult to get drunk. Even if she tried to keep up with her new friends in her physics program or the ones back at the X-Mansion, she would be the only person sober by the end of the party (not including Piotr because…well, Piotr didn't go to parties to get drunk). She wondered how much Logan drank during his binge sessions to actually black out.

Marie knew her fascination with the topic was probably weird and unnecessary, but she wanted to know whether Logan knew that technically he couldn't get drunk. Did he have to plan to drink? How much did he spend? Did he pop some xanies to help speed up the process? Did it help him overcome the guilt and sorrow of Jean's death?

The thought hadn't even occurred to her until she heard Scott sobbing in one of the classrooms, a short week after Jean Grey's funeral. She barely had to read his mind to hear the words  _my fault, my fault, my fault_  repeating ceaselessly. She turned the corner hurriedly to comfort him and saw Logan sitting on a small seat in front of the desk pouring whiskey into two glasses. It occurred to her that sharing that single bottle of whiskey was not going to help him forget or numb anything.

"That was super nice of you," she said to him later when she found him on the bench in the yard.

"You know me, Mr. Nice Guy," he said hollowly.

She sat beside him on the other end of the bench and clasped her bare hands together. "I'm sorry about Jean. You should know that she wouldn't have wanted either of you to mourn her for long." At his long look and raised eyebrow, she tapped her temple twice. "I have bits of her in here sometimes. Scott sometimes talks to me…her."

Logan's expression told her he didn't like this at all. She couldn't tell whether it was the fact that she had Jean's memories and personality embedded in her psyche or that Scott was taking partial advantage of that. "She touched you," he stated. "With your permission?"

Marie realized for the first time that he had not seen her since St. John attacked her and killed himself. "Jean…had a hard time controlling her abilities before she died at Alkali Lake. I was starting to learn how to use my mutation properly so she thought if I touched her, it would weaken her mutation enough for her to gain control. It  _did_  work, but…not for long," she finished, remembering the small figure standing below a wave of water, glowing against the impending darkness, before the water overtook her.

Logan considered this. Then he asked, "You're okay with Scott talking to her?"

She sighed. "He's not really talking to her. It's not like I can bring people back from the dead." Marie shrugged. "I just talk like her sometimes, say things that she might have said, and it brings him comfort. He knows I'm not replacing her." Marie squeezed her hands together. "I'm okay." Before losing her will, she stretched out her right hand to his, placing it gently on his open palm. Expecting to feel him hesitate or pull away, she was surprised when Logan's palm only trembled beneath her hand before closing to hold her.

He gave her a smile that made her warm. "I'm proud of you, Marie," he said.

In the tower, only a few more years ahead, Rogue across on the smooth, stony ground watching her friend, wishing that he still felt the same about her.

They lazed on Logan's bed with copious amounts of alcohol around them as they watched a hockey game. Marie didn't really know the teams or much about the game past the goal of getting the puck into the other team's net, but she liked it when the bodies slammed together. She rested her head against his shoulder, their fingers intertwined in the imaginary space between them.

"She died alone."

The smile fell of her face sooner than she wanted it to. "We come into this world alone, and we leave the same way. But Jean would have wanted us to remember the time in between, the time spent  _alive_ , sharing, learning, together…the stuff that makes life worth living." She knew it was wrong, speaking the words only Jean would say.

Marie bit her lip when she caught him looking at her. He brushed her hair off her neck and shoulder and leaned in to kiss her. When their lips met, a spark in her chest exploded and she responded with eagerness. His hands roamed her body and he wouldn't allow a single centimeter of space between them. When she tried to curl her fingers into his hair and relax herself, he let her go.

They were side by side, panting, staring at the ceiling above them. When Marie peeked at Logan, she saw him with his eyes closed, one hand pinching the bridge of his nose.

"Sorry, that wasn't right," he said.

"It felt right to me," she said, breathlessly.

"That's not what I meant." He turned and slid his hand to the warm curve of her neck, down to her exposed collarbone. He slid it back up to cup her face. "It was an impulse. I wasn't in control…I don't want to do this like this," he finally finished.

She looked at his blue eyes. She rested her hand over the one holding her face. "Okay. Let's not lose control."

* * *

After the revelation that  _she_  was the asshole who brought them to the middle of nowhere, she stopped hiding in her room for the rest of the day. Suddenly, the loneliness became overwhelming. But that was a lie. As soon as Logan pointed the finger at her, she shut herself in her cave and cried until her furleaves were wet and realized she was actually no longer on the pile but rather inside it. She stared at the leaves of the bed wondering when exactly she had taken Kitty Pryde's mutation.

They sat in the hallway. She shoved her fingertips under her thighs and rotated her ankles until the made clicking sounds.  _Click, click, click_. Logan sometimes looked up from  _Ham of Rye_  to give her a look to which she would stop.

She had known that Logan liked to read every now and then when she caught him perusing through Professor Xavier's shelves at the mansion. But she had only recently found out that he could fluently read and write French and Japanese -she suddenly felt embarrassed how poorly she judged him. Though she secretly boasted about knowing him the best because she met him first and that she had a part of him inside her, she had misconceived him as just a brute and a drunk with a kind heart.

A kind heart: she couldn't say there was a single person she knew that could compare to him. He never blamed her. The sunflowers were overtaken by mutated Daisies that had two or three coronas per stalk or Gerberas that had rose petals flourishing in the pistils. Sometimes the wind howled and seeped through the roof; sometimes Rogue believed she could hear the wind singing.

Then resume.  _Click, click, click_. She knew he wanted her to ask all the questions in her head and he knew that she could read his mind whenever she wanted except the lack of urgency in his voice and demeanor told her something was unfixable.

_Click. Click. Click._

Logan slapped the book shut. "What?"

"Are you going to tell me what's going on?"

He tossed the book on the table in front of him and leaned back casually into the chair, his hands hanging resting on the arms. "Did you know the story of "The Manciple's Tale" before you burned it up?"

She gave him a blank look. "Where are you going with this?" she wanted to ask. Instead she said, "You sound like Professor X." He gave her a look as if she said a stupid joke. He waited for an answer. "No," she answered, but immediately felt the lie sear her tongue. She knew it. Of course, she did. Because Professor X knew it. She felt faint knowing she had never intentionally taken Professor X's mutation. And somehow Logan knew she knew too because she continued to wait for her.

"Phoebus has a white, talking crow and a wife he isolates in his home. His wife, in her loneliness, takes on a lover and the crow reveals her digression to Phoebus. In rage, he kills his wife. In his grief, he blames the crow and curses the crow to wear black feathers and an unmelodious voice." Rogue bit her lip and waited for him. "What's your point?"

"In one single moment, he lost control, destroyed everything and blamed a bird," said Logan. "And for what?"

Rogue didn't know what to say.

"These books are all from Chuck's library," he continued. "Every single one. All of them about self-destruction and annihilation. He planted something in your head when you took his mutation."

Rogue stood up angrily. "I would never!" she yelled defensively.

He shook his head. "You're in denial, Marie."

"Don't call me that," she snapped.

"Everyone was affected by the Void. You'd be lucky if you weren't coughing up those spores like everyone else."

" _You_  look fine to me," she said accusingly.

"Who knows," he replied. "Maybe I've had it in me longer than anyone. But at least I was used to feeling that way. Something was coming. Or was already there. It was the reason everything was going to shit: why Pyro killed himself, why…Phoenix killed herself, why Shadowcat  _tried_ to kill herself."

"The Void," said Rogue. "It doesn't explain anything. Neither of us were suicidal.  _I wasn't suicidal._ We didn't get sucked up by it. We tried fighting it with everything we had."

"It wasn't just making people suicidal. It just made people  _reckless_. Willing to do anything and nothing." Logan got up and sat beside her. "Pyro…he had it inside him. There was something off about him, but I couldn't say what it was. If I wasn't so…." Logan struggled to finish that sentence. "If I hadn't paired you two up, he would have never touched –"

"St. John was crazy. He would have done it whether we were paired up or not," she told him.

"He was infected. And he infected you with it," insisted Logan.

"Why would you say that?"

Burning blue eyes met hers. Rogue no longer felt that she understood who this man was anymore. "It's the only reason you would take the mutation of every single person in that mansion."

* * *

The hollowness inside her ached and begged to be complete. Marie stood in mansion's hallway, seeing and seeing nothing. A student passing by patted her bare arm and asked her if she was okay. She wasn't sure. The student gasped, a hand quickly covering his nose and mouth, and ran away from her calling for help. Bobby emerged from one end, concern lacing his features. Professor Xavier, wheeled out with Ororo and Logan, came soon after.

"How long as she been like this?" Logan asked, his hands on either side of Marie's face, trying to get her to recognize him. She wasn't sure who he was.

"Petra found her standing her like this for almost ten minutes," replied Bobby.

"She doesn't look well," said Ororo. "We should take her to the infirmary."

"Bring her to my office," said Xavier.

Marie barely felt the small probe in her mind by Professor X in his large office. His unease soon became resolution. "Logan, you need to take her away from the school," he said urgently. "I suspect she will use her mutation against the students."

"What?" Logan exclaimed. "Chuck, this is Marie.  _Marie_ , c'mon, snap out of it."

"It's inside her, Logan."

Logan loosened his hold on her and looked uncertainly towards Professor X. Bobby stepped away from her towards a large bookshelf; Ororo shot him an annoyed look.

"I'll put her to sleep. Take her somewhere remote and see if she can recover. Right now, she will hurt others."

The probe returned in her mind, a familiar hypnotizing feeling, Marie began to feel sleepy. She should sleep. She should sleep….

Something in her mind snapped. Logan yelped in pain and stumbled back, his face looking suddenly pale. "Marie, don't –"

Her skin prickled.

A raging waterfall crashed down on her mind, but the water was comprised of voices, a hundred thoughts and memories, probing and pressing down into the skin of her neck, and then punching up through the bone on the back of her skull and into her brain…and then the pressure eased even though the impression of unlimited force did not let up and even for a time, still drowning, an icy calm came over her, and through the calm bled a monumental white-gold light. She smelled a burning inside her own head and there came a moment when she screamed, her skull crushed to dust and reassembled, mote by mote.

It was the most agony she had ever been in, as if a metal rod had been repeatedly thrust into her and then the pain distributed like a second skin inside the contours of her outline. Everything became tinged with the red. She blacked out. She came to. She blacked out, came to, blacked out, still perpetually gasping for breath, knees buckling, scrabbling at the air as if it could aid in support. Her mouth opened so wide from the shrieking that something popped in her jaw. She though she stopped breathing for a minute but the hurricane inside experienced no such interruption.

Then the terrible invasiveness was gone, ripped away, and with it the sensation of drowning and the thick sea that had surrounded her. There came a push and Wolverine pushed her aside, into a looming and wide bookshelf, past the limp bodies of her loved ones. She laid, bruised and crumpled. With nothing to lean against, she fell like a sack, crumbling before the weight of so many minds, so many thoughts never meant to invade her. She sucked in air in great shuddering gasps.

 _Perhaps_ , her final thought as she watched Logan abandon the bodies and rush towards her,  _my only real expertise, my only talent, is to endure an abyss beyond the endurable_.

* * *

"I'm so sorry, I'm so sorry, I'm so sorry, I'm so –"

She repeated this for hours, her voice first loud and clear, Logan at first just watching her with her head between her knees, his last cigarette between his lips, then trying to get her to stop repeating, until he left her alone in the hallway and her words transitioned to hoarse whispers.

It was raining again. The flowers were beginning to invade the tower. The vines of daisies wrapped itself around every frame of the tower with long, drooping petals. The furleaves coated the hallway and tunnels like a soft carpet. Strangefruits grew larger, sometimes the size of their heads.

Rogue wondered what Kitty thought when she died. Did she believe that she killed Juggernaut? Or did she have doubts that Rogue might have suppressed her mutation at the Worthington facility after taking the boy's abilities? Did she ever share her thoughts with Bobby? Would Bobby forgive her? Would anyone forgive her? Hadn't she thought so long ago what it would feel like to have a thousand voices calling out in her head? What did it feel like? Nothing, she thought. She couldn't hear anyone.

She raised her head when heard Logan sit beside her, a strangefruit open in his hands. He offered her half. She accepted though she was sick and tired of eating the same alien fruit every single day, not knowing whether it was even safe. She was tired of wearing the same clothes every single day, having to walk around in her camisole and underwear while she waited for her washed clothes to dry. She was sick of sleeping on furleaves and sitting on stone. She hated the tower. She hated the forest. She hated this planet.

"You know what I could go for? A cheeseburger," said Logan.

"What?" Her voice cracked.

"With smoked cheddar. A side of curly fries. A big ol' mug of beer."

"Logan, I'm so sorr-"

"And a cigar."

"Logan –"

"I dream of cigars."

They were both quiet for a moment.

"I know you do," she replied softly.

Logan smiled for the first time since she woke up in the tower. Through the rain, Rogue saw a small ray of sunshine.

"No side of fruit?" she attempted to joke, holding up her half of strangefruit.

"I will never eat another fruit in my life."

"I want coffee" -she sighed as she said this – "Freshly brewed. Little bit of cream."

"Steak."

"Ice cream."

"Pecan pie."

"Stop, you're making me hungry."

He tapped the bottom of her hand lightly. "Then eat the pie, Marie."

Marie took a bite of the strangefruit. She began to cry.

Logan scooped up her tears one by one.


	4. Epilogue

Logan's eyebrows drew together when he looked down at the furleaves between them. A single, mutated daisy sprouted from between the tufts of leaves. "You need to get better control of Elixir. Let's start with that."

"He's the hardest one to control," she complained. She shimmied away from him and frowned at the ugly flower sprouting from their bedding and sighed. "You know, I'm not sure I'm the one doin' this. Hank used to say that Void started mutating the plant life long before it started affecting us."

They let that statement hang between them. It was a scary statement. It meant that the alien was getting closer, possibly returning home. She wondered if it was finished with Earth. She wondered whether it would be surprised to see two aliens in its home planet. She hoped they would scare it.

She pushed Logan's hand off her waist and got up to better look at the flower, cupping a hand around the freakishly large petals. It leaned and caressed her hand. "Well, that might actually be Lin Li. It's feeling scared to be out there."

"Tell it to get out before it no longer has the choice," said Logan aggressively. "Well, can you get control of it?"

"Maybe." Marie closed her eyes and focused on speaking to the plant.  _Please go back outside!_  Instead of the smooth response she normally received, she heard garbled sounds in her head. "Jesus," she said as she opened her eyes. "It literally speaks a different language. Lin Li would have never been able to talk to the Void." She sighed, dejected, and fell back into the furleaves to snuggle herself in Logan's chest.

Logan leaned in and kissed her forehead tenderly. "Doesn't matter." Another kiss. "We can try to go through each person, one by one, till we figure out which mutation you used to get us here," Logan reasoned.

She knew he disliked relying on her so much. She was their only way out of this planet. Marie thought there might be nothing to go back to, but there was no use arguing about it. They needed to go home.

"I'll try," she promised. She would, for him.

* * *

Marie remembered a time years ago, before she and Logan ever got attacked by Mystique and Sabertooth, when they parked the camper in a field off a deserted Canadian highway. Logan had the back of the camper wide open as he sat on the edge while he took swigs from a bottle of whiskey. Marie had begged and begged and begged him to let her try some.

"You're such a little shit," he said gruffly before finally handing her the bottle.

She took one large gulp and proceeded to immediately cough it up. She sheepishly gave him back the bottle.

"Jesus, you never had whiskey before? Didn't you say you're from the south?"

"I'm seventeen," she replied.

He rolled his eyes. "Some excuse."

"Well, excuse  _me_  for bein' a good noodle, Mr. Logan," she slurred almost thirty minutes later.

"Yeah, yeah you're a real noodle," he said. He tried to hold her off as she tried reaching for the bottle again. "Come on,  _be a good noodle_ , Marie. Lay off." He was laughing at her.

"Stop being mean to me!" she whined. "You should share, meanie."

"Hey, I didn't think you were going to go weak on me after one drink. Teaches me to share ever again."

Marie crossed her arms and curled herself up on the other end of the entrance of the camper. Her lower lip jutted out comically and Logan looked like he was enjoying this too much. He looked down at the field where she was looking at and found a lone daisy. He jumped off the edge of the camper and plucked the small flower and handed it to her. "My gift to you," he said.

"I don't want it," she grumbled. When he raised an eyebrow, she accepted it, twirling the stem between her fingers. She slid the stem behind her ear, the flower peering behind her hair.

"You can take the bed," he said as he climbed back into the camper. "My second gift to you."

She didn't say anything but pulled off her boots and slid under the thin blanket on the bed. She tossed him the pillow. "This changes nothing," she said. Marie didn't want to admit that she couldn't even remember what she was pissed off about.

Logan laid down on the thin sheet on the floor beside the bed and laughed. "Oh, Marie, you break my heart."

Marie turned in the bed and pulled the daisy out of her hair and stared at it. "There's something wrong with this flower," she said.

"What is it?" he asked. His eyes were already closed.

"It doesn't look right," she mumbled. She stared at the yellow center of the flower, at the way florets spiraled and swirled. The small black hole at the center looked wider and for one paranoid second, she thought something was staring at her. "Oh my God, I'm so drunk."

Logan laughed again. "You're somethin', I'll give you that. I think you'll have a very interesting life ahead of you."

* * *

They sat on the ledge one evening, neither one sure how long it had been. Months or years? Their legs dangled off the ends; the space below was an empty black mouth underneath. There were cracks running along the dirt pathway around the tower, slowly growing closer and closer towards them every few minutes. The trees that once stood strong and proud crumbled with large booms that made Marie wince.

Marie kicked her legs off the porch, almost feeling like she was on a swing. Her legs swung all the way underneath the ledge. She suddenly remembered Kitty's legs as they passed through her bed frame and it made her smile sadly. Her hands balanced her beside her, suddenly covered by Logan's large, warm palm. She glanced up at him and a swell of emotions rose in her chest. "Thank you for staying, Logan. I'm sorry I didn't say it before but thank you."

Logan grunted a response to let her know he heard her. Marie could tell that despite her gratefulness, Logan must have felt the weight of his decision. He could have escaped this miserable life long ago. He turned to her when she squeezed his hand tightly. "It was worth it," he said, honestly.

They sat in silence as they watched the large, dark mass in the sky, approaching the tower. The night sky shone brighter than it ever did. Every star must have been alive and awake and  _burning_  to see the destruction of the two mutants. Some moments, a rain of meteors would soar across the sky and land somewhere far, far away, the tremors vibrating through the planet to the tips of Marie's fingertips. The vibrations would echo back from her fingers and become music or voices -sounds of her memories.

Suddenly, every star twinkled for a moment and vanished one by one. She thought they may be reflected from her eyes, within the depths of her black pupils. The sky itself folded like crumpled paper and the Void, what she believed for so long was intense darkness was golden and full of light as it emerged from the blackness before them. Had she been so afraid of this beautiful thing? She hoped St. John had seen that within her. Wind swept up the trees and dirt and broken pieces of the tower with it. Marie and Logan held one another's hands just the same, unwilling to separate ever again.

 _It's time, isn't it?_  Marie thought. She closed her eyes, for it made no difference in this blackness and light whether her eyes were open or not. She felt a fluttering in her ear, the scruff on Logan's cheek rubbing against her skin. "Marie, I –"

And then they disappeared.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please let me know what you think!


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